They sound like a very exciting new investment opportunity. Gold Farms …. ah yes!, a place where rich farmers cultivate more wealth than you can possibly imagine.

In reality, they are small, grotty internet cafes where young Chinese ‘farmers’, sometimes real farmers, work 12 hours a day, playing games.

Yes, you heard me right. Playing games.

This phenomenon is a bit of an old story now but simply put it is a form of outsourcing that involves gamers playing famous online games to win points or gold pieces. They sell the gold pieces, or sometimes entire game characters, to people who don’t have the capability or inclination to do it by themselves. The transactions are done using Ebay or just by word of mouth.

According a report in last year’s New York Times, you will pay $9 for 100 grams of World of Warcraft gold. It costs $269 to be transported to Level 60 in Warcraft, and it typically takes a gamer 15 days to get the account to that level.

Now it appear though that there has been a negative reaction to the farming concept. Regular gamers don’t appreciate the fact that the gold farmers work together in big team to attack smaller groups and take their gold. They also complain that the creation of all this gold for sale in the real world causes inflation in the gaming world.

Yes, you heard me right again. Rising prices in cyberspace.

Done well and it sounds like a symbiosis between time-poor Western game enthusiasts and cash-poor young Chinese farmers. Done badly and you have real potential for abuse.

Some people have taken this concept further and hired hundreds of Chinese game players to do the work. They then sell the results, gold coins and developed characters, as you would any other product. The Chinese teens seem to be motivated to take the work because some of these Gold Farms have literally hundreds of kids playing all day.


Career Challenges

My question would be: How are these young kids going to be able to handle the boredom of the normal workplace? Right now they are all Warcraft Heroes!, or Level 60 Gold Finders!. When they do enter another part of the workforce, these guys are going to be very difficult for HR departments to handle, if they ever apply for regular work at all.

In the past many of these farmers would leave their small plot of land and join newly invested factories in an adjacent city. The work would not necessarily be very challenging but when you are coming from a subsistence living, any work that pays cash is to be welcomed.

But in the past few years or so we have seen rising food prices resulting in less available talent for factory work. The farmers stay at home with their families and we have the paradoxical situation of having 1.3 billion people in China and a shortage of factory workers.

Will this new phenomenon make things worse?. Now they can stay at home and make real money.


[First posted on [url=http://english.talent-software.com]Talent in China[/url]]

[Frank Mulligan• Entrepreneur-Recruiter-Speaker • Talent Software • english.talent-software.com • frank.mulligan@recruit-china.com]